


Earth Mother

by Leidolette



Category: Dredd (2012)
Genre: Amorality, Canon - Movie, Canon-Typical Behavior, Gangs, M/M, Subterranean, heat waves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:27:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24573820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leidolette/pseuds/Leidolette
Summary: A deadly heat wave forces Judge Dredd into the forgotten tunnels of Mega-City One to hunt down an energy thief. The weight of history -- his own, and Mega-City One's -- dogs him at every step.
Relationships: Clan Techie (Dredd)/Joseph Dredd
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityabrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityabrin/gifts).



You can never escape.

That's the lesson the clan techie for Ma-Ma's gang learned, for the hundredth time, when he opened up his door to the stranger who had come knocking just a week after the collapse of Ma-Ma's empire. He'd been staying at an old spot that members of Ma-Ma's gang would use when things got too hot and they had to lay low for a while.

Clan Techie didn't know the man standing on the other side of the threshold, but he knew his type. Sunday gang signs were written all over his face, his body. The man smiled at Techie and gestured off to the side. From an alley came two more men -- just as big, and just as surely belonging to Sunday's gang.

Ma-Ma had worked with the Sunday gang sometimes; mostly hiring runners and lookouts just beyond the edges of her territory, nothing big. She'd still had to wine and dine the local leaders though, and he'd seen Sunday's lieutenants relaxed and entertained at Ma-Ma's headquarters at Peachtrees once or twice.

Now he knew they must have seen him as well.

It was the usual thing. They made veiled threats, Techie capitulated. They waited at the door, sneering, while he packed his stuff. What else could he do? He had no family, no friends, no money. Ma-Ma had already taken everything from him, and now even she was gone.

Techie looked at the old hideout. It was shit -- bare mattress, clothes that weren't his, discarded food wrappers that were. But it had been his alone this last week. Techie didn't know where this gang was taking him, or what they wanted him to do, but it would be there ends he would be working for, not his own.

The first man laid a hand roughly on Techie's shoulder. Techie hoisted his ratty duffel bag higher on his shoulder, and left.

* * *

It was on the third day of the city-wide heatwave that Judge Dredd was called to the 54th floor of the Grand Hall of Justice. He wasn't alone. A dozen judges were in the room when Dredd arrived, and about a dozen more filed in after. The room was very warm despite the cool air hissing through the vents. Underneath their helmets, every Judge's forehead was beaded with sweat, unseen.

The Magistrate stepped up to take the podium at the front of the room on the exact top of the hour. The scattered conversations ceased when the holo-screen behind her lit up with a multitude of red dots clustered over a map of a few mega-blocks.

"Judges, you're looking at the casualty count related to an unplanned series of rolling blackouts. With daytime temperatures consistently at 115 degrees or higher every day for the past two weeks, temperature control in the surrounding area is strained and failing. Our intelligence department estimates that nearly 350 heat-related deaths have occurred in three nearby tower blocks as a result of damage caused by power siphoning."

In addition to the 500 heat deaths caused as a result of malfunctioning air-conditioners, inadequate ventilation, and exposure, that brought the death toll from the heat wave up to 850 in their jurisdiction alone, Dredd noted. He shifted on his heels; it felt like the temperature had just crept up another degree.

The Magistrate flicked to the next image. The face of a man loomed large next to her. He had a tattoo of a sixteen-point compass rose splashed across a cheek and eye, but non-descript besides that. Maybe a little on the doughy side.

"Reports indicate that Sunday was one of the primary victors of the power vacuum from Ma-Ma's death. He sopped up the lion's share of her territory, and most of her surviving foot soldiers. The gang must have taken a step or two up in the world, because our tech department is having a hard time pinning down exactly where they're operating from. We've narrowed it down to these eight City Blocks." On the screen, the view zoomed in one a cluster of Blocks that were highlighted a sickly yellow.

The Magistrate continued. "We're assigning an elevated patrol of Judges to the area. In addition to your regulation patrols, each Judge will be assigned a few possible blindspots in the area to check out. Most will be duds. If you happen to be a lucky winner and find the entrance, call it in."

A notification blinked in the corner of Dredd's visor. When he checked it, his assignment rolled across the screen. It was nothing unusual, a familiar area, even. At the center of the map, one word loomed large.

 _Peachtrees_.


	2. Chapter 2

The old man wrestled the busted air conditioning unit to the floor and opened the window further, hoping for some relief. Dredd doubted he would find it. The Mega-City's endless asphalt and glass landscape did nothing but magnify the punishing heat. All that old man would likely get for his trouble was a punk creeping in though the window at night trying for anything that wasn't nailed down.

There was an ambulance parked at the block's entrance. Dredd watched from atop his idling Lawmaster as emergency personal eased a wheeled stretcher over the curb. The stretcher's payload lay still under a white sheet. No one was in a hurry; the patient was long past saving.

A dozen dead today so far, he'd heard over the police band. And it was barely noon.

Dredd paused at the main thoroughfare into Peach Trees. The damage from last month's firefight had been cleaned up, and the Mega-Block had been returned to the ordinary dinginess that had characterized it before. Across the street was the beginning of the Wyndham Ridge Block and down the street further the thick concrete of Mega-Block Casa Lago rose into the sky. All the blocks looked exactly the same -- the lives of one hundred fifty thousand people within a glance.

The area assigned to him was just a little further on and, of course, looked the same as the blocks preceding it. People in undershirts milled about the courtyard of a City Block in the midst of a rolling brownout.

A few kids were skateboarding on a cracked chunk of concrete, but even their movements were listless.

Dredd revved up again. It wasn't too far now.

He rode to the location of his assigned access point. When he got close, Dredd could see that the panel had been pried open and that it was now an open hole in the sidewalk with a narrow grate stairway leading down into the darkness. Judge parked his motorcycle.

The panel being tampered with wasn't particularly unusual or worrying. The desperate got into everything.

The first level of the sewer was actually a relief. The temperature dropped a few merciful degrees as Dredd stepped through the entryway. This advantage alone was enough to draw a bit of a crowd to the area. Dozens of people sought refuge from the heat in the space, pressed up against the concrete walls, still sweating.

It stunk, but so did most places in Mega-City One.

"Tampering with Mega-City infrastructure is a Class-C offense, minimum sentence is eighteen months months in iso-cube." He spoke loudly, to no one in particular. Tired loiters weren't worth the Department's time, not when there were bigger fish to fry on the stove that the City had become. Still, he spoke loudly, and most of the citizens within earshot merely groaned and shuffled back out into the hot sun and their airless rooms beyond.

Dredd keyed in the the maintenance code for the next doorway. This one showed no signs of tampering, and there were no loiterers on the other side. No human beings at all, just a long, clear hallway lit by harsh bulbs every thirty feet or so. Dredd's boots echoed as he walked. He descended a cramped stairway, then another. The walls were covered with bundled wires and peeling labels. Every now and then, a clump of wires rustled when he neared it.

Rats. There must be hundreds of them; crawling through the pipes, nesting behind the panels, endlessly gnawing on wires. God only knew what they ate. Probably each other.

Dredd didn't shudder, but only by force of training. Despite the sweltering sun, some part of him would be relived to be back out on the streets again. Out there the scum was all too human, but at least he was used to it. These passages felt like a tomb.

Up ahead, a dull glint reflected the track lights. He was reaching the end of this access tunnel, a stainless steel wall heralded the end. But, when he got closer, Dredd realized it wasn't the end, not quite. Right there, to the right of the dead end, sat a door where one shouldn't be.

Dredd looked at it for a moment longer, then checked the map again. No, nothing was supposed to be there at all.

It wasn't some half-done rat hole; the door looked legitimate. It merely sat there in the wall, innocuous as can be. So why wasn't it on the map?

There really could be nothing good behind that door. Some judges, _many_ judges, might just turn back around and pretend that they hadn't seen it. Finish their shift, and go home at the end of the day.

That thought never even entered Dredd's mind. He reached for the door handle.

The air on the other side of the threshold was noticeably chilled and dank, this time unpleasantly so. In other circumstances, Dredd might have felt glad to be spared from the heat, but this felt about as welcoming as a mildewed cupboard under the sink. He saw before him a spiral staircase of metal grating leading further down into the dark.

Above his head, a thick power cable was screwed into place on the crumbling wall with new bindings. The cable ran with the tunnel into the blackness.

He considered his options. He had no contact with headquarters through any of his devices; much too deep underground. And he wouldn’t be able to establish even the weakest connection until he was back among the loiterers, at least.

Dredd remembered that still shape under the sheet before it disappeared into the back of the ambulance. A dozen heat-related deaths already. Since he'd been down here, the count must have slowly ticked higher.

Judges tended to be solitary creatures, they were trained that way, they had to be, to survive. They were also quite expendable, and trained to know that too. Now that he was here, Dredd would not return to the surface again until he had either found Sunday, or proved to himself that he wasn’t here. Instead, he pressed the 'attention' button on the side of the humming power usage monitor nearest to him. That would get someone's attention, eventually.

Down the stairway he went.

Off the main corridor, dozens of smaller tunnels made their own way into the darkness. Dredd ignored them, there was no sense in wandering lost underground until he died of thirst. The cable stayed on the main corridor, and so did he.

It was from one of these half-caved in side tunnels the near-undetectable whine of servos activating caught Dredd's trained ear, and he had just enough time to see the tell-tale glow from the auto-target before throwing himself violently backwards on instinct.

That instinct honed by a thousand encounters as a Judge saved his life, because the instant after he moved, a hole the size of a fist blew up bang in the mildewed wall right behind where he'd just been standing. Automated defenses, some part of Dredd's mind registered, while the rest was busy making sure he didn't get killed.

Looks like he found the hideout, he thought, huddled behind the hunk of concrete, the sewage maintenance workers sure as hell didn't station these here. A new spray of bullets chewed up the wall behind him. Now what?

Well, he had to take out that auto-gun, unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life kneeling on the filth-covered floor of a sewer. He risked pushing the very tip of his gun's scope around the corner, before jerking it back as the auto-targeter spat out another stream of bullets.

"Fuck," Dredd growled as a sharp chuck of concrete blew off the wall and slashed against his cheek. This thing was going to bring the house down around his ears if he didn't do something quick. A grenade was absolutely out of the question, unless he wanted to help it along.

"Tracers," Dredd rasped at his gun. The internal cartridges spun and he lined up the shot in the mirror. A quick squeeze of the trigger and the bullet exploded out. A red streak of light went wide of his target. Dredd gritted his teeth in frustration; huddled behind a rapidly diminishing shield, backwards aiming, and ghostly night vision were not elements especially conducive to bulls-eyeing the target.

Another round burst against the wall near his side. He strove for icy calm. He took his time, and raised his gun again. Boom.

The delicate mechanism of the targeting system shattered into so much plastic and wire trash and fell to the ground in pieces. Judge Dredd stood over it, each quick breath putting at the leather of his jacket tight over his chest.

Then he heard the second whine begin. He only had a moment to realize that it was off behind him, nestle in the crack of a wall that had long deteriorated under the stress of supporting Megacity One.

Dredd spun around, but he knew it was too late. It was point blank, there was nothing to be done except feel the searing pain of the bullet that must be already be firing from the gun.

Dredd didn't close his eyes, or wince; just stared at the barrel.

Then Dredd blinked. Nothing happened.

Dredd's eyes flicked to the indicator light. Power was on, the attack mode was still engaged, but the gun wasn't firing. In fact, it was in the process of resetting back to it's original position, no longer the least bit interested in the Judge in its midst.

A decidedly non-electronic shuffling noise caught Dredd's attention from his side and her shook off his stunned stupor and was back on his feet in an instant. There was the culprit. Dredd's arm shot out into the darkness and drew back in his iron grip a terrified skinny man. He shoved his gun up under the man's chin.

"Freeze," Dredd said, punctuating his statement with a little shake.

The noise the man made was somewhere between a gasp and a shriek. He held his hands up in front of his face defensively. Still, not before he caught a glimpse of the young man's eyes.

His inhumanly blue eyes.

Dredd's fist relaxed and let go of the fisted shirt collar. He lowered his gun, but didn't put it away.

"You," was all he said.

For a moment, the young man was still too scared to speak.

Dredd took stock of the young man. He was unharmed -- or, uninjured, at least. He still had that unhealthy air about him. His electronic gaze slid away from Dredd's reflective [eye plate] and darted from side to side, as if looking for a way out.

Dredd noticed a device in his hand. "What's that?" Dredd asked, gesturing. It looked suspicious.

The kid stared down at the thing in his hand like he'd never seen it before. Then, "Oh. Oh, this is just a remote scrambler." His voice was a little high.

"You use it on the automated guns?"

"Yeah, I can modify their processors a little. O-only when I'm close."

"Are they off now?"

"No, just inactive. I, uh, may have slipped your image into the machine's database of rat images."

Dredd stared, lip starting to curl.

The kid seemed to curl in on himself. "The guns aren't programmed to shoot at rats -- there's too many of them, it's just a waste of bullets."

Undignified, but effective. Dredd had to admit that the kid had saved his life. Now the question was: for what purpose?

"Ma-Ma's clan techie," Dredd said in acknowledgment.

Right, thought Dredd. The kid had skills, no way was he ever going to stay on the market for long, and he'd been pressed right back into service in exactly the same position as before.

"Went right back in, huh kid?"

"I didn't... It wasn't my choice," Techie said weakly.

The worst part was that Dredd believed Techie -- he'd been around long enough to know how the system worked -- but he just grunted in response.

"And what are you doing here? Just taking a stroll through the sewers?"

Dredd didn't think Techie was the kind to be sent out to play act as the innocent, but Dredd had been burned before, however sincere the kid seemed. He waited for an explanation.

"It's not like with Ma-Ma. It's hard for me to even speak of her, but, still, Ma-Ma... liked something about me. That didn't stop the horrors, but, she felt something. For Sunday, though, It's a means to an end."

The kid looked like he was surprised he hadn't been told to shut up yet, but Dredd wasn't much of a talker.

Dredd turned towards the young man, eyeing him.

Techie flinched with his whole body.

Dredd looked at him.

"I know you're not going to hurt me. I know that," Techie blurted. "I just... can't help it sometimes. It's like my body makes the decision for me."

He rubbed a hand over his face nervously, and when he met Dredd's gaze again his eyes seemed more artificially blue than ever. The kid had his reasons to be jumpy, Dredd figured. More than most, even here in Megacity One.

Dredd could tell the heat was getting to Techie, even down here. Red was rising all over the pale skin of his face and neck. A lock of hair was plastered to his cheek with sweat. This part of the tunnels was kept uncomfortably warm by heat radiating from steam tubes and various exhaust pipes. Techie's eyes looked at Dredd like he was in the process of pinning hopes on him.

"Come with me," Dredd said finally, "you're a material witness."

Decision made, there was nothing left for either of them to do but follow the power cable. And the cable went down.

After an interminable descent, they came to an area that was only familiar to Dredd from pictures shown during history lessons.

The old subways, from back when this place had been only a city.

They were deep now. Far deeper than when this station was in use. Generations of accretion and construction had pushed the street level further and further up. It was as if this forgotten space were sinking slowly away from the surface into the bowels of the earth.

Detritus from the old world sat in piles around them. Most of it had settled on the tracts, but a decent amount moldered on the main station floor. A creased travel brochure was on the floor at Dredd's feet. He flicked it over with his boot. A smiling couple stared back up, posed in front of a spectacular view of the Grand Canyon.

He let it fall back over. No one in their right mind would want to visit the Grand Canyon. Now it was just an irradiated garbage dump packed with refuse from Mega-City Two.

They had lunch there, like the world's most improbable picnic.

There they were, in utter darkness. Dredd's visor switched to night-vision mode and showed him the world in muted black and white. Techie said that his eyes worked alright in the darkness too.

Dredd snapped one of the glow sticks in his pack and a weak but welcome light filled the room. They sat there in two cracking plastic chairs next to a long dead potted ficus. A green thing like that would have been worth something up top, had it been alive.

Dredd took a couple ration bars out of a pocket and handed one to Techie. They tasted like road grit pressed into a brick, but they filled up a stomach like nothing else, and Techie looked like he'd skipped too many meals in his life.

For a while, they ate in silence. It was just the crinkling of the ration bars and their breathing. They were too deep for even the scrambling of hidden rats.

"Why did you stop the automatic guns from dropping me?" Echoing off the walls of the old city in the dark, the question seemed more poignant than Dredd meant it to be.

"I owed you," Techie said softly, simply. "For freeing me from Ma-Ma, and letting me go after."

Dredd shifted uncomfortably. "That was Anderson."

Techie shook his head, looking at the ground. "No. I saw how you operated. If you didn't approve of what she did, you would have stopped her."

Dredd chewed his bar and said nothing.

"I want out again. For good this time."

"So climb up that ladder."

Techie shook his head. "There's nothing for me up there. I need help. I've always needed help. When I'm in my own, I just..." He trailed off. “I want to go back with you.”

Dredd sat there like a stone. “I can’t help you, kid.”

"They're as bad as Ma-Ma."

Dredd looked into Techie's electric blue eyes. Anderson had told him how Techie had gotten them.

Techie swiped a hand over his face self-consciously. "Not like that. Sunday's gang leave me alone, mostly. Too alone. It's just me and a computer in a white room all day. At night they play their propaganda over and over again."

"I don't think they'll need me longer." Techie went on after a moment. "There's a guy and a girl -- two of their own people -- who are always studying my work. They're not very good, but they must be enough, because every day there's less and less for me to do."

"You'll get out." Dredd wasn't in the habit of offering empty promises to perps, but he was not lying. Whether Techie was brought out in handcuffs or a body bag, Dredd would make sure that the gang was done with him.

Lunch done, Dredd stuffed the ration bar wrappers back in the pocket he'd retrieved them from. The station was so full of refuse, he could have let the trash drop, but that wasn't what being a Judge was all about.

The cable led led them away from the subway station, down a long corridor of ancient brick that sweated putrid water. Next to an underground river perhaps, one long ago poisoned by the Atomic Wars.

It must have been the water that had attracted the horror that Dredd and Techie didn't realize was following them until the next stairway. That's when they heard the click of its claws.

The thing must have once been a rat. An animal that came in from the Cursed Earth, or born and bred near enough to the City walls for it to be practically the same. Dredd saw it first, and had the sudden thought that the automated guns should have been programmed to take out rats too, no matter how many bullets they wasted.

Large as collie, the rat eyed up the two of them. It must have wisely decided that Techie was easier prey, because it made a flying leap towards him right before its former perch was blasted by a shot from Dredd.

Techie stumbled over his heels backing away as the rat landed with a thud on the grating and scrabbled towards him.

The next shot from Dredd didn't miss, and the rat exploded in a spray of gore. Its body thudded down hard on the walkway next to Techie.

That was about time the rusted-out floor gave way behind him.

Judging by the look on Techie's face, he had just enough time to register the wide open darkness yawning wide below him, dotted with hundreds and hundreds of patches of softly glowing lichen patches, like the strangest stars, before Dredd's arm shot out like it was spring loaded and arrested his momentum in a sudden, bone-jarring jerk.

Dredd yanked the kid back from the precipice, right into his chest. Techie's scrawny frame did him a favor, for once, as Dredd was easily able to pull him back from the claw of inertia. Dredd only let him go again when they were both firmly back on the dry metal grating and nearly a dozen feet from the edge.

Letting go of Techie turned out to be a mistake, as the young man's knees jellied under him and he started to wobble to the floor. Dredd grabbed his arm and pulled him back up again, keeping him steady.

Techie's chest rose and fell in great huffs. He reminded Dredd of a greyhound in this moment, lean and sweating. Always too high strung, always at the bidding of another master.

Finally, he said, "You're always saving me." Techie's smile was weak, but genuine. It made Dredd feel uncomfortable.

There was nowhere left to go but down after that. The descent seemed endless, and the temperature fluctuated wild with each level traversed. Some were filled with the chill of the grave, others sweltered with the hot tubes and vents of unknown industrial processes.

Finally, when the air was so stale that breathing was a chore, and the only sound was the pounding of blood in their ears, they came to the last door.

The cable ran to the door, and then through the wall next to it. The door was more of a metal hatch, really. The heavy valve in the center stared at Dredd like an accusing eye.

The odds weren't with him. No backup. No one from the Great Hall of Justice even knew he was in trouble.

"You wait here," Dredd said as he busied himself checking his ammunition, his guns, his body armor. It was little worse for the wear, de spit the action he'd seen tonight.

Dredd felt the light touch of Techie's hand on his back. He turned to see-

Techie kissed him.

It was a near thing, but Dredd pushed down his startled fight response just in time. But even if he wasn't throwing punches, Dredd was no less flabbergasted.

When he put his arm around Techie's body, he could feel how slight the man was against him. The realization made Dredd press him against his chest harder, his kisses deeper.

A light beard burn stood out red on Techie's neck -- it matched the flush rising high in his cheeks. Dredd couldn't blame it on the heat this time. This lowest level of the city was cool and dry as a bone.

"I've wanted to do that since Peach Trees," Techie said, then the slowest, sweetest smile spread over his face.

How messed up was this guy? It was entirely alien to Dredd that someone might look at him in full Judge's uniform with anything other than fear or hate.

The hatch didn't open on the first try, nor the second. Techie was next to useless with providing extra muscle, but he did happen to have a small tube of industrial lubricant for machine joints that eased the way enough for Dredd to scrape the thing open on his own.

A blast of cool air hit them both the moment the seal broke. The sweat on Dredd's jaw and neck prickled pleasantly in the breeze. Dredd twisted the scope from his gun and pushed it through the crack. Nothing but hallway in either direction.

Dredd motioned for Techie to wait, then closed the door behind him. The last he saw was the electric blue glow of Techie's eyes in the dark as crescent of light spilling in slowly shrunk, and disappeared.

Dredd tried not to think about those twin lights in the darkness.

This corridor wasn't like the other. The temperature was pleasant, the humidity normal. The walls and floor showed no trace of grime despite being a calming off-white.

Everything looked dated -- the fonts, the architecture, the tech -- but in a good way. A way that spoke of comfort, the way they used to make things.

He eased his way in and stepped lightly. He was in enemy territory now, despite how pleasant the whole place looked. Where was he? What was this place?

There were no sounds of footsteps in the hallway. It was not since he got to the first row of display screens that he was sure that it was occupied at all. There on the glowing screens was the live surveillance feed of people -- families -- gathered in rooms and around tables. They seemed to just be talking or relaxing. Almost fifty people seemed to be occupying this oasis at the center of the earth.

It was surreal, after the grueling trek through the tunnels to be greeted by the sweet sound of children’s laughter, yet there it was echoing down the hallway. Dredd sidestepped into an empty room to avoid any possible face-to-face meeting.

The footsteps turned left at the intersection, away from Dredd, and Dredd relaxed enough to take in the rest of the room he’d ducked into. It was just as disconcerting as the laughter. The tables before him were laden with a jungle of plants reaching for the hydroponic lights hanging low from the ceiling. 

Dredd approached the table closest to him. A tomato hung off a stem like a red miracle. Dredd had never seen so much fresh food in one place in his life. He’d found Eden half a mile beneath Megacity One.

Another group passed the room as he hid behind the door. They were all ages -- some of them children, babies even. They looked healthy.

When the echo of the last footfall faded, Judge moved on. He caught a flash of small robot traveling down a side-hallway. It was a cleaning robot of some sort, he didn't recognize the style.

He followed it. The unthinking little machine led him into a room that seemed to have no end. Upright pods stretched into the distance to the vanishing point, innumerable wires and tubes dropped from the ceiling to attach to the endless pods. And still the whole place was a dazzling, sterile white.

A cryogenics laboratory, but on a gigantic scale. Dredd couldn't begin to estimate the cost of the resources necessary to build and maintain this place.

Dredd walked through the cryo bank. Row after row of misted containers with gently glowing red lights below the readout screens. Dredd raised a hand covered in a black leather glove to wipe away the layer of frost covering the window of the pod. From behind the glass, a wizened, rotting face stared back.

"We just leave them, too much of a bitch to clean up."

Dredd started and turned around, gun drawn. It was useless, he already had half a dozen guns trained on him.

And there was Sunday at the helm. The compass rose on his face looked bigger in person than it had on the holo-screen. "You like our little village here, Judge? I like it too. Awful nice of this crowd here to leave it to us, even if they do make terrible decor."

Sunday shot a nearby pod a look of disgust and gave it a hollow rap of his knuckles. "This is just a fucking graveyard, is what this is, All these rich suits paying through the nose to be stuck in a frozen coffin and left in a dark. Rich people never know what to do with their dollars, always pissing their money down the drain in one way or the other. Just give it to ol' Sunday and I'll show them the right way to spend it!"

"Citizen, you are accused of the unauthorized diversion of electricity from the City in excess of a million Mega-City-watts. The sentence is fifty years in the iso-cubes. Put down your weapons and come with me."

The words came out of Dredd's mouth by rote while Sunday and his gang just laughed. Dredd took the time to surreptitiously take in more of his surroundings. Dredd wondered at the smell. A hint of mildew and rot under the nose-numbing combination of cold and chemicals. The smell of a failed cryo unit. All the pods must be faulty.

What had happened here?

They must have slowly died as the bags of hormones the life support computer fed into them went dry over the centuries. Or maybe all at once when a machine experienced a lethal mechanical error in the cooling unit the year before.

Or maybe it hadn’t been an accident. S he looked at the little red lights signaling catastrophic failure that flowed beneath ever single machine stretching out in cornfield rows to the end of the underground warehouse of frozen flesh, Dredd began to suspect that there had been no error at all, just malevolent human will.

"Come with us," said Sunday. Eager to show that his boss was serious, one of his footmen shoved Dredd forward.

His impact against the machine jarred it from standby mode, and suddenly the interior lights of the pod illuminated below him. Mere centimeters away, Dredd was confronted by the frosted face of the pod’s occupant. This time, Dredd didn't bother to look.

"Yeah, we diverted most of the power from these tanks. Who cares? These are the people who made the world the shithole it is today, anyway. They deserve it." Sunday seemed to be taking Dredd's taciturn nature as an affront and filled the entire laboratory with his chatter.

The passed another row of chambers. The tags below each cryo-chamber included employment level, or military rank, or net-worth. Without fail, they were always very high.

Sunday's inane, one-sided conversation had reached the point of self-justification: "I mean, what do you Judges want from me? All this stuff is just here, and you expect me not to use it to help my family?"

"And the families sweating it out in the blocks?" Dredd didn't usually talk to perps. There was no point. But now, Dredd needed time.

”Look, we didn’t need the extra stuff at first — pulling the plug on these suits was enough to meet our needs. But then, you know how it is, someone’s cousin needs a place to stay, and then someone else has triplets, and then before you know it, you need more power then you got.”

Dredd was silent, jaw squared.

"And what do you think we're doing with it, huh? The same thing they would upstairs. The same goddamn thing. Except that it's us and our families."

A shadow slipped in behind Sunday. A very slim shadow that was heading towards the computer terminal by the threshold. Dredd didn't blink, didn't move. Only his mind started in surprise at this new information, and then realized that perhaps he shouldn't be so surprised after all. Underestimation followed Techie around like a bad penny, but he always proved it wrong.

Sunday certainly wasn't paying attention to shadows behind failed pods. Sunday's voice almost had a manic not of self-delusion in it now, but he was still talking through it. "It's them, or us!"

The computer terminal beeped, and suddenly a protective fire partition dropped down in front of Sunday's men, cutting them off from Dredd and their boss. Sunday's eyes raced over to where Techie stood by the terminal. His lip curled in recognition.

"Oh, you fucking traitor-" The man swung the gun toward Techie.

 _BLAM_!

That was it. Dredd dropped him, and a spray of blood covered the white tile where Sunday had been.

The lieutenant stationed at the other end of the hallway already had her gun half-raised. Dredd dropped her too. Techie flinched.

"Come on," Dredd said roughly, grabbing Techie by the wrist.

Using one of the terminals in the lab, Dredd reported his situation to his superiors, then cut the power cable.

And just like that, the tired air conditioning units in thousands of neighboring mega-blocks sputtered to life and made the suffocating tenements bearable enough to survive in -- for a while, at least.

And, much more importantly to the brass, the temperature of a dozen or so sealed penthouses dropped down a few degrees, back to the perfectly balanced balmy coolness they'd been maintained at for years.

Meanwhile, down in the lab, the evacuation team had better arrive quickly, because the underground community had mere hours before the lack of air circulation suffocated them all.

Dredd and Techie decided to leave be a more direct route, a makeshift elevator that Techie knew Sunday's gang took to get supplies from the outside. Dredd jammed doors and Techie scrambled access codes in a trail behind them, hindering their pursuers long enough to burst into the elevator.

Breathing hard, the two stared at each other as the rickety lift chugged its way up. Even under the dim, yellow light from the single bulb, Dredd could see the marks on Techie's arm where it had scraped against the brick by the automated guns. Techie's lips, too, were red, and Dredd realized that it was from their kiss in front of the valve door. The color had never gone away. Techie had crept in the cryo-laboratory, sabotaged the power, and felt a bullet explode in the wall next to his head with lips still raw and sensitive from Dredd's roughness. Dredd couldn't stop looking at Techie's mouth.

Those electronic eyes must have not missed a beat, because Techie, unsteady on the rocking lift floor as a newborn deer, slowly approached Dredd. For his part, Dredd allowed it to happen; there could be no pleading surprise now, no protestations of innocence. He saw Techie's hand reach out to his bicep, and let it happen, because, god help him, he wanted it too. He wanted it too.

It had been so long since Dredd wanted anything.

When Techie's fingers began to curl around his arm, Dredd reached out and pulled him in closer. Techie was tall; their chests pressed together, their bellies. Dredd twisted them around so that Techie's back was against the juddering wall of the lift and Dredd crowded his front. Their hips were pressed together now too, and Dredd had to kiss him. Dredd's mouth opened hot and wet against Techie, who responded with such hopeful earnestness that Dredd had to fight against an answering weakness in his knees.

Techie was a perp, a witness, a civilian, a victim. The weight of Dredd's Judgeship pressed down on him as he slid his fingers into Techie's hair.

And yet...

The elevator screeched to a stop.

A blast of hot, sickly air greeted them as they emerged from the pipe. There was the faint smell of engine exhaust and asphalt. The surface.

The light was as bright and clear as it ever got in Mega-City One; it was the fresh light of morning, Dredd had been in the tunnels all night. He saw Techie blinking very quickly -- it had been months, maybe, since he had seen the light of day and the kid seemed stunned by it.

There was no time to slip away. The support team from the Grand Hall of Justice was already there, surrounding them and streaming into the pipe they'd just left.

"Judge Dredd!" Techie said in rising panic as a trainee slapped restraining cuffs around his wrists.

Dredd dispensed the law. He didn't break it, and he wasn't corrupt. He didn't twist the law for personal favors.

But... he could recommend.

Judge muscled his way through the confusion until he reached the Magistrate Judge overseeing the operation. The Judge's Lawgiver was out and ready for action, he looked like he was itching to use it.

"Sir," Dredd said, his voice feeling rusty, "I think that the Clan Techie could be valuable. He has already been acquired as an asset by two gangs. I don't want to see him fall into the hands of a third."

Dredd's boss barely looked at him. "The Clan Techie will be in no one's hands, Dredd. He'll be serving out his years in a iso-cube," the Magistrate said. He was much more focused on the gang members that were now started to be pulled from the elevator, kicking and screaming.

Dredd almost gritted his teeth. "Sir, with the utmost respect, we both know that not even those iso-cubes are secure from gang infiltration."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"That he become an asset to us."

"And how do you propose to keep him in line?"

The idea of Techie as some hardened criminal constantly bucking against Dredd's authority almost made his lip twist into a smile.

"I'll take care of him." The words were mundane aloud, but the echoed back and forth in Dredd's head.

"Fine." The Magistrate Judge was clearly done with this conversation. "He's your IT attaché. That means your responsibility and your problem. Don't screw it up."

Dredd found he could live with that very well.


End file.
